April 17, 2014

2008-2010 Young social media managers emerge at brands to help them navigate new social media tools.

2011-2013 Social media turns increasingly from an earned/owned media channel to a paid media channel.

2014-2016 Old skills become obsolete. Brands, who are now spending a lot of money on the now-mature social media channel, need to optimize their spend. Young social media managers are replaced by data-oriented internet marketers.

If you believe this framework -- IMO you should as it's entirely what we've seen across consumer brands -- you understand there are a few implications:

Old skills and first-generation tools become obsolete if there is no commitment to innovation.

New innovations can emerge quickly and solve major pain points in consumer brands.

Access to data, at scale, becomes very important.

Whereas all this UGC (user-generated content) is a massive collection of Facebook comments, Tweets, ratings/reviews, chat logs, forum discussions, words become gold for the data miner.

What's being said, when, how, and by whom becomes something we can solve with technology -- and something much more desirable than say reading a hundred thousand comments/day manually.

Without going into too much detail about my own company or Twitter (I was there three weeks ago and am under NDA), I think I can say that Twitter realizes just how important data and scalable APIs really are. I was very impressed with the vision that I heard from a wide range of personnel at the meetings I attended, all the way to the top.

We do for Facebook pretty much exactly what Gnip does for Twitter. Increasingly, our ability to help brands get access to Facebook feedback at scale is sparking great conversations and projects with consumer brands.

Everyone is moving in the direction of big, scalable social data for a range of scenarios.

Using social data to target individuals most likely to transmit a marketing message, visit a retailer, try a new product/service

We live in very exciting times, as I believe the next 5 years will bring us some remarkable marketing innovations that tap into the millions upon millions of pieces of social feedback that are generated worldwide every day. I am just glad to see one of the major players both acknowledge this and act upon it in a meaningful way. Kudos to the Twitter team for moving the industry forward!

November 04, 2013

Over the last year to 18 months, we've talked with a lot of consumer brands about how they can harness Facebook data to better react to customer feedback, make data-driven decisions, and significantly improve the efficiency of media buys.

Most companies know that the data is rich and prime for investigation, but they don't know how to get started. That's where we come in. We bring hard data to help inform decisions that are often made today by feel or by subjective criteria.

We have established a great working relationship with Moroch around big data and have a few victories under our belts with some of the top brands in the world. We're excited to continue innovating with them as a partner. Moroch understands the value of data and how to make it pop for its clients.

More to come as we continue to innovate and help consumer marketers turn big, social data into a meaningful part of the marketing mix.

October 17, 2013

For those of us who are more left-brained thinkers, it's a pretty exciting time right now in 2013.

Silos to data have been broken down in many instances... and there are a plethora of data sources available for fee or for free that can be tied together.

Data visualization tools have progressed well beyond the visual and data processing constraints of Microsoft Excel. Business people can make things happen in tools like Tableau or SiSense, and D3 is emerging for situations that benefit from significant customization and drilldown.

And perhaps most importantly, the "data-driven" approach is moving beyond early adopters and becoming something that many consumer brands and enterprises want to both know more about and execute more effectively.

Call it "revenge of the nerds" if you will.

The secular trend in business is to give data a seat at the decision-making table. Savvy executives understand that there are a lot of ways to measure expertise. And the person who asserts him/herself as an expert might not be as infallible as once thought. He/she may bring biases to the table that data can confirm one way or another.

A multidisciplinary approach to data is necessary to take full advantage of the opportunities. Why? Because it's a problem with different dynamics that require different skill sets that often don't lie in a single person.

Opportunity identification -- a keen knowledge of what is out there, as well as the classes of data that are generally easy and those that are difficult to obtain.

Data "creativity" and translation to business problems -- the ability to listen to client needs/requirements and propose/present data-driven solutions to help improve upon current decision-making.

Understanding of statistics -- familiarity with different statistical methods used to build explanatory and predictive models to enhance decision-making that is currently done by feel or more subjective criteria. Key here is to employ statistics *accurately* and let the conclusions come forth from the data.

Data visualization -- knowledge of tools/resources available across the aforementioned tools and technologies such as Tableau, SiSense, D3, etc.

This is what it takes to become more data-driven. Fall down in one of these areas, and data efforts can miss the point.

What I find that most enterprises and consumer brands want is the best of all worlds. How do I take advantage of the people and expertise we have, but augment them with the conclusions and accuracy that only data can provide?

Nobody wants data to replace original thought, but rather to augment it and turn people into smart, discerning, and data-driven powerhouses.

May 08, 2013

Quick update today -- the "data proliferation problem" is just a theme I've heard from a lot of conversations recently.

A fellow "data" startup CEO mentioned to me the other day that he lamented just how hard it is to sell "data" and "data services" to people in brands and the enterprise. Marketing departments have millions of dollars to spend on print advertising that they know does not work... but a modest $100,000 investment to help people understand their data opportunity requires significant explanation and is often met with blank stares.

We're in an odd point in time kinda like we were in with social media in 2007. Evolved enough for people to recognize the promise, but too early for budgets and organizational alignment to have taken place. This does not frustrate me all that much -- but it is a growth opportunity for small companies such as ours and a chance or visionary bigger companies to jump out to a quick, early lead.

I have a lot to say on this subject and will follow up here and in some of my guest blogging on how business is evolving. Suffice it to say that winners will be data-driven decision makers. They'll have context about what is important and what is not, and they'll execute well. They will know statistics, business goals/metrics, and they'll understand the interplay between operations, customer data, and their own systems.

Companies will increasingly hire or appoint Chief Data Officers -- and not just those in data-intensive businesses either. A single person and/or office will handle issues related to making data useful and actionable for a business but will also be careful to not expose private data to people who should not see it. It's a tough problem, but a fascinating opportunity.

March 05, 2013

SXSW Interactive2013 approaches... it's the the fifth year in a row I'm attending and the sixth in the last eight for me. The event continues to thrive and is the one "must-attend" event of the year in my book.

A few quick thoughts on the panel I was invited to join by Carter Rabasa of Twilio and Hung Truong of NewFoundry -- it's my first time speaking at SXSW. I straddle marketing & technology professionally, and am speaking on the tech side in this session.

Discussion will center on mashups and/or "OPD" -- other peoples' data. To me, the term "mashup" is a little antiquated in sense that today's developers are doing far more with data than when the term "mashup" originated. I remember, for example, when plotting points on maps was relatively novel. We've come a long way in the last 5-7 years.

Take for example the developer marketing paradigm that was of most interest to us during my ~4 years at Microsoft, ending in 2008. We wanted developers to write apps for .NET and in some cases Microsoft software... to build custom applications and experiences on top of the Microsoft stack. Interestingly, the next cycle of web/mobile innovation has come from not building apps on existing software produts but rather from building apps on top of the data that apps and the web platform has enabled. The apps and web frameworks are reduced in that paradigm to an infrastructure role, and themselves are not where the action is once the infrastructure is in place and mature. Data is the star, not the infrastructure.

Think of it in a more tangible context -- the interstate highway system is built in the USA in the 1950s and enables interstate commerce. This creates a trucking industry, rest stops, Stuckey's restaurants, the need for more cars, faster travel, and so on. Infrastructure was the enabler -- tons of businesses followed.

When I was at Microsoft, we incorrectly focused on the infrastructure as the "star". We did not recognize that the data contained in the applications was much more exciting than the platforms upon which the data were entered. For example, the world's most interesting repository of information is arguably Microsoft Outlook. Liberating that data & creating new things from it was the play back in 2008 (and arguably may be the case today).

I think today's major tech players differ from yesterday's in the sense that they value data as much as the underlying infrastructure that allows its collection. Developers and platform providers are currently engaged in a natural tension -- one wants innovation from modest to disruptive and the other wants to participate in the economic benefit of having its data used in new, compelling ways. Some, like Craigslist, choose to optimize for control. Twitter will let you do more or less whatever you want, if you pay them. I'd contend LinkedIn and Facebook are taking more of a "wait and see" approach, both allowing developers access but keeping a lot of goodies to themselves. There are no right/wrong answers in my opinion -- it's really up to each company's strategy.

But if the open source model has one lesson for us, it is that the increased velocity and use of data creates economic value -- typically for all the stakeholders. Developers play a key role in the ecosystem, bringing new use cases and creative ideas to bear. Overall, I think that's a good thing.

February 11, 2013

Today's blog post comes to you from our Business Development Manager, Craig Carter, who had a little fun speculating about Lance Armstrong and Facebook. I thought it was pretty amusing, so here goes...

(Preface—Except
for the Facts and Figures charted below, all statements are pure speculation
and have not been confirmed by the World Anti-Doping Agency.)

What do Lance Armstrong and Facebook have in common?

The short
answer is they have both given their teammates Performance Enhancing Drugs
(PEDs). Now before you go running off
to the mountain top, screaming that Mark Zuckerberg is peddling concentration
steroids to his coders, let me explain.
Large brand pages and Facebook are all on the same team. In one way or the other, they are working
together to improve marketing performance, brand image, and make a profit. So WHEN, HOW, and WHY did Facebook, not only
begin to give brands PEDs, but dare I say, try to get them addicted?

It all
started around June 6 (conveniently after the FB stock price declined 30
percent in 20 days) when all engagement metrics on large brands and company
pages started to track upwards faster than the Cliffhangers Game on “The Price is Right.”

I am sure
this is partly because of some great new content, more posts, insights from
Facebook Ninjas/Gurus/Rock Stars, and increased ad spending on Facebook, but
more so, Facebook hooked up the engagement IV to all its pages and started
pumping them full of likes, comments, and shares. Just imagine Lance secretly
giving his racing team wondrous enhancers, and then the team started winning!

As Social Rock Stars became the one direction of the office, Facebook
took the hit as their stock “plummeted.”
I even heard rumors that “Zuck” was selling his couches on Craigslist to
pay for dinner. But just as Lance was
the genius behind the doping of his many Tour de France wins, Facebook had a
plan—give away marketing, get brands hooked on engagement, and then slowly stop
trickling the drug through the IV.

What
happened next … just ask any local drug dealer.
Give away the drug, get ’em addicted, then start charging for it. Low and behold, right around the time when
massive free engagement stopped, Facebook’s stock value started going up! I feel this really started happening around mid-November—actually
after the Facebook pundits started yelling from the rooftops about EdgeRank changes.

As we are
now over a month into 2013, it will be interesting to see what happens with
these two pieces of data. All I can say
is ask Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds if PEDs are just like Pringles, “Once you
pop, you can’t stop.” Meaning these
brands are going to be pulling out their pocketbooks to get back to their
former glory.

Data Note: All
data presented came from Polygraph Media’s Facebook Data Analytics Engine. The
62,682 posts analyzed were from 125 large brand and company pages from Jan 1,
2012, to Jan 28, 2013. In order to
remove outliers and smooth the data, I removed 599 posts for being 3-standard
deviations greater than average and opted to use a 7-day rolling average of the
total likes received on all the pages. Give me a shout if you want to see some
of this data and analysis first hand!

February 06, 2013

Analytics has become a hot topic over the last 12 months as middle-managers are asked tough questions by their executive stakeholders.

For all the insanity around social marketing, mobile apps, and "conversations", many CMOs, CIOs, and CFOs want to know exactly what they're getting for their money. Budgets are growing and advertising spend is fluid. People want to know the impact of strategy changes and tactics tweaks. But don't worry. This pattern is not just familiar to you in your business, it's happening everywhere.

Middle managers have turned to analytics to rationalize what has happened -- to measure success and failure. But I'd contend that some of the early analtyics offerings are doing a bit of a disservice to the very clients who rely upon them. Charts, graphs, and data visualizations are compelling -- so they must be authoritative.

But are they really?

The one question you should ask of any analytics offering is simple:

Do I truly understand the metrics presented in this chart?As a marketer, do I understand how to improve the metrics presented in this chart?And finally, do I understand clearly how these metrics impact my company's ability to make more money, save money, and generate a return on investment (ROI)?

As I talk with corporate marketers about social marketing, content, and advertising measurement, I'd say that at least half the people do not understand the data presented to them by Facebook Insights. Few, if any people, understand what Facebook's Reach and PTAT (People Talking About This) metrics really mean. Almost none understand how those metrics should be used and interpreted. And fewer know exactly how they'd improve upon those numbers. The same goes for abstractions on hard metrics provided by third-party analytics providers.

The only way to get a true understanding of your performance is for your metrics to match the things you know how to do. On Facebook, it's simple:

Page Likes -- how many Fans do you have, and is that number growing?

Posts -- how often do you post?

Post Type -- how often do you post different types of content to keep your Page fresh?

Shares -- how often are people inspired to share content with their friends?

Comments -- how often do people comment on your Page?

Likes -- how often do people like content that you post?

Engagement Rate -- by time period or post, how well does your content truly perform?

Facebook is the top of the funnel for many consumer marketers -- it's an awareness vehicle that can help you create a better conversion rate for other online activities. It can also identify your top fans and people who advocate for you online and offline.

But (and I'll pick on Facebook Insights for a moment) if you're using metrics such as Reach and PTAT as religious metrics that you watch feverishly, I think you're missing the point. You're succumbing to the folly of analytics as opposed to the data-driven answers that big data analytics can provide.

If you go to the effort of measurement, you're ahead of the game. But you're really ahead of the game if you take a data-driven approach. Be sure to measure the very things you know you can affect. Otherwise, you're just guessing.

January 16, 2013

Howdy everyone -- it's been awhile since I've posted here. Lots of work on Polygraph and a new addition to my family in the form of a baby. Margot Ellen Treadaway was born on December 14th and is our first child. Lots of life changes -- all good. But the blog has taken a bit of a back seat recently.

That's a-changin'. Regular blogging is back for us as we bring Polygraph v2 to market. I'll tell you more about that later.

But for now, I thought I'd better explain how our business has evolved and where it is going. For those of you who have followed the Notice Technologies ride, you know that we've had quite the journey.

We started in 2009 with a couponing platform for local businesses. We hit the streets and talked with as many local businesses as possible -- in an effort to build something perhaps a little less one-sided than Groupon in terms of who benefits from the transaction. Local businesses were tough to work with because they demanded immediate results -- and didn't have the time or energy for anything that failed to generate immediate, incremental revenue. Hence Groupon. Groupon built tremendous value for itself, at least early... but much of it was at the *expense* instead of the *benefit* of the local business. That's why Groupon remains a largely unsustainable business model -- and why we didn't (right or wrong) pursue group purchasing aggressively. It's also why local businesses haven't gotten a revolutionary marketing platform yet. It takes iteration, which local businesses simply aren't willing/able to do unlike other classes of customers.

We tried salvaging those couponing assets by offering them to newspaper groups. But that became its own set of problems as you can imagine, and local media didn't prove to be much of a gainful opportunity for us.

All the while, we'd been hearing from people in agencies, brands, and other larger companies that measurement of social media was a huge pain point. Facebook Insights didn't do the job well and still doesn't. We saw an opportunity with our v1 of Polygraph to jump into the analytics fray. And that's been a very positive move for us.

But we see a bigger trend and a bigger pain point in a lot of companies. Businesses large and small are trying to better understand what value they're driving from social media. It isn't enough for the world's leading companies to conduct best practices, adopt a social media management system, hire a consultant, or outsource social media to an agency. The C-Suite really wants to know a few things:

What business metrics are being affected by good social media execution?

Is there a statistical relationship between social data and revenue or other mission-critical business outcomes?

Do Facebook Ads and the like really work?

How are competitors grappling with Facebook for customer outreach, customer service, and other marketing purposes?

Is the social channel truly worthwhile?

Should social earn a greater or lesser investment moving forward?

Who do CEOs and CMOs turn to for clear, data-driven answers to these questions? They certainly can't turn to existing agencies of record -- they're too invested in a positive answer. C-suite execs need a BS detector to tell them what the data says, and we're increasingly that BS detector.

Polygraph does an inventory of available data and collects it from Facebook for a company, its brands, its competitors, and its portfolio of Facebook assets. We cache it, analyze it, and find relationships in the data. Companies will sometimes give us other data sets that we'll add to our analysis -- such as web metrics, e-commerce results, or other mission-critical data. We look at it all holistically to understand the customer engagement system -- how people discover the brand and make decisions to engage, interact, and make purchases (where applicable). We seek understanding of the customer walk and conflict resolution -- are people using the brand's social assets as a customer service vehicle.

Ultimately, all of this data tells us a compelling story that can drive next steps. Should you keep your existing agency or find a new one? Does your portfolio of assets provide a return on investment? Does social data correlate to real-world business metrics that matter to you? Can we find evidence of causation? Does social data move the needle or vice versa?

Understanding is what the C-suite craves today. But the C-suite doesn't have it today. Agencies aren't independent arbiters aligned with the interests of a C-suite exec responsible for driving revenue and profit. Unfortunately, very few marketers are equipped with the analysis chops necessary to make the case effectively also. Sometimes, a marketer is equipped but isn't viewed as an independent, disinterested judge.

We're doing some fascinating projects right now in several major consumer industries that I wish we could talk more about -- but we're under NDA. It's admittedly a little frustrating in that regard. But you should know that the data unlocks fascinating insights that leading brands are beginning to uncover today. Truth lies in the social data. That's what we do -- collect, analyze, and drive insights from social data.

The picture painted is probably a tad on the pessimistic side. If your Salesforce, you don't buy a Buddy Media to harvest but rather capture market share. I'm sure a conscious decision was made to spend whatever necessary to win share asap -- so costs are going to be higher in the short-term than revenue. This is why people invest in Salesforce.com, for the prospect of future cash flows and the benefit of capturing share now at the expense of optimizing short-term financial results.

Remember also that this particular business is super competitive with Salesforce, Adobe, Google, and Oracle all competing in the SMMS space against a few independents (Sprinklr, Spredfast). Keep in mind also that a lot of SMMS work is still being done manually by service businesses from IBM to digital agencies to traditional agencies now competing aggressively in social marketing.

But I do think there is a lesson lurking in here -- that social is still an unproven commodity in the short-term. Folks like us and others are doing what we can to find value in social media. Investors who get into social media plays, whether through publicly traded companies or those selling privately held stock, do so on the belief that their picks will help the marketing ecosystem in some way. But it's still the wild west when it comes to delivering real value.

Whether it's Buddy Media struggling or Facebook ads struggling or folks like Mark Cuban questioning whether or not he should pay for Facebook News Feed visibility, it all comes down to one critical and unanswered question -- what is the value of social marketing for marketers?

When the answer to this question is as simple as it is for search... i.e. Google Adwords... billions of dollars of new shareholder value will be unlocked. Now where exactly will that be, and when?

October 23, 2012

This is the presentation I gave last week to the Facebook Success Summit about Facebook ROI, the right KPIs, measurement, and analytics. It is dense, so be forewarned... but perfect for the data-driven marketer, CMO, marketing manager, or really anyone trying to add the right numbers to "opinions" that still inexplicably drive many marketing decisions. Enjoy!